AN INTER-COMPARISON OF THE SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL CHARACTERISTICS OF CO OVER HIGH FIRE REGIONS BASED ON MOPITT AND GFED

Abstract. The spatial and temporal distributions of Carbon Monoxide (CO) as measured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging spectroradiometer (MOPITT) instrument are analyzed in depth in this work. We specifically look at how these values, their statistics and their trends behave from 2000 to 2018 over regions defined as high fire regions, based on the carbon emissions product from the Global Fire Emission Database (GFED). Our results indicate that there are significant differences in the timing, duration, and magnitude of the fires as measured by MOPITT over different high fire regions. Our results are also different from past studies which have relied upon remotely sensed aerosol measurements, such as AOD. Over these high fire regions, we find that the fires contribute the vast majority of the CO loading, which always occurs over a short period of time, on order of weeks. Over 7 regions studied, we have found a statistically significant decreasing trend, albeit smaller than the measurement error. The correlation between the MOPITT and GFED approaches if found to be reliable over the regions where the two datasets overlap. We finally find evidence for possible long-range transport of CO from one fire region to another.